Poems

Ideas of Home

              i

Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone

surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur

Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,

The Last Laugh

‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.

Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,

The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this'll be both criticism and poetry and 

failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/

and and/or neither/nor machine comes in having been touched

Bury Me in Arabic

“Morning of goodness to you”

— “Morning of goodnesses”

Or add flowers: “morning of roses”

Always multiply the gift—

“welcome” to “two welcomes”

“a hundred welcomes and kinship and ease”

Francesca Woodman

i

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by  which  we  are constructed  and undone

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

A Net I Seek to Hold the Wind

When the burning started in August, because it kept

its own schedule, it could be early without seeming eager.

On Point Reyes there was fire locking antlers with fire

and the fires at Big Sur had so broad a wingspan

An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google/Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google

écoute

à quoi bon être poète

beau dire

ce mal

semble dans la tête comme

marteau feu enclume clou couteau

ou l’éclat d’une baudroie ou des

aurores boréales

Index of Themes

Poems about night

and related poems. Paintings

            about night,

sleep, death, and

Language

Do you speak your language? 

I stare — I just said: how are you? 

I thought English was my language

apparently it isn’t

I thought Halkomelem was gibberish

the devil’s language

Not the Music

Not the music.

It is this other thing

I keep from all of them

that matters, inviolable.

I scratch in my journals,

a mouse rummaging through cupboards,

Editing the Prairie

Well, it’s too long for one thing

and very repetitive.

Remove half the fields.

Then there are far too many fences

interrupting the narrative flow.

Get some cattlemen to cut down those fences.

Exculpatory Lilies

Good Friday, the day they delivered

that sad bouquet, was the day our cat

ran out on the road and failed to look

both ways. I’d stashed the candy eggs

under the sink, in their pink raffia nests,

Men in the Gut

Scrape the inside of sleep the belly wall

tasting like yoghurt cooked broccoli

its emptiness leaving something

on the tongue. Escaping the body

that wants to quit from the inside.

Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

thing no song sing but in the word

Kome’s Story

for auntie nagasaki

it's the same story

told again & again

the modulations

& the machinations

the maudlin

A Story from Easter: He Has Risen

There is a mouse under the sink

Little mouse turds around in the kitchen drawers

It is raining, storming

The refrigerator

has gone to the dump

Donald's back

has brought him to bed for several months

Comfort

11 am. Time to wake up.

Muscles sore, jaw clenched, warm light

scattering dreams of violence across

the bedroom. I've chosen a self

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

We Lived Happily during the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

Mother Church #3

KIN KLETSO/YELLOW HOUSE

CHACO CANYON, SAN JUAN COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

ANASAZI RUINS, AD 1125-1130

For Henri, at 2

pimîhkân

Here's how you make pemmican

1. wiyâs 

2. pânisâwân

3. kâhkêwak

4. yîwahikanak

5. pimîhkân

Here's how you make pemmican

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

How Prayer Works

Tucked away in our tiny bedroom so near each other

the edge of my prayer rug covered the edge of his, my

brother and I prayed. We were 18 and 11 maybe, or 19

and 12. He was back from college where he built his own

Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows

When I consider everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”

Windrim

To Windrim or sycamore

           rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne

Red Pheasant / Man In Black

i’m gonna walk right out of hell

i ain’t trying to hurt no one

well there might be someone special,

but by now they’re dead and gone

there’s a line of black smoke rising

you can hear the woman screaming

Rhizomatic Thinking

We're drinking coffee in January's

bed. It's raining. The harbour

hammers high at Lake Ontario.

What an inconvenience. The end 

times, I mean. Can I unwelcome

the undoing? There's burning beyond

From all you can is the best you can

i once shoved my foot through glass

getting to know my own anger

its patches of stupid

bloody love

stress is just a socially acceptable

word for fear

Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Mrs. Kessler

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,

And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,

And stood on the corner talking politics,

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure 

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste 

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally 

asked what has changed

Even staring out the window is changed,

the private peak above it all brought down

with the erosion of the poise between

the viewable and the mused unseen.

Dissolution so nearly changeless as not

From the Window of My Home-Town Hotel

On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain

which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,

in the dry, steep ravines, the live

mist of the heat is seething like dust

left over from an earlier world.

The Song of the Smoke

I am the Smoke King 

I am black!

I am swinging in the sky, 

I am wringing worlds awry; 

I am the thought of the throbbing mills, 

I am the soul of the soul-toil kills, 

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

My Brother at 3 A.M.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps

when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.

         O God, he said. O God.